By Claudine Holt
For nearly a century, the ALP has dominated political life on the left in this country. How to relate to the Labor Party has been a question that has racked the brains of generations of Australian radicals. Is it a vehicle for the forward march of the socialist movement, or is it an obstacle, a graveyard of radical hopes?
In his book, A New Britannia, published in 1970, socialist historian Humphrey McQueen makes a valuable contribution to answering these questions, shooting down many ALP sacred cows in the process.
According to McQueen, and contrary to popular belief, the Labor Party was not formed simply as a result of the defeat of the maritime strike in August 1891, which highlighted for the labour movement the need to create its own political party to advance working-class interests. In fact, a federation of labour parliamentarians had been mooted well before the strike in anticipation of parliamentarians being paid a salary by the state. From its very beginnings, this new party reflected the class interests and motives of its first slate of candidates, who included farmers, mine managers, chemists and journalists, few of them drawn directly from the working class.
Created by the trade unions, the ALP inevitably reflected both the strengths and the weaknesses of the unions, in particular the fact that in the 1890s the trade unions embraced only one fifth of the work force, primarily the more privileged and skilled workers.
While the ALP had socialists within it from the start, it was never remotely a socialist party. Today, after a century of conducting itself in Australian political life, it is clear that, despite its electoral base in the working class, the ALP's program and practices in government make it a capitalist party, an alternative party of the ruling class.
While an increasing proportion of the Australian population has become convinced of the fundamentally conservative nature of the ALP (during the last decade especially), even the first decades of Labor in government provided enough evidence for socialists and radicals to look at forming organisations that would defend working-class interests in a way that the ALP had ignored. For example, in 1911 this so-called workers' party helped to establish the Commonwealth Bank ("the banker's bank" as Curtin described it). In the same year, and despite plank six of the ALP's platform for the 1910 election, which called for state-owned iron and steelworks, the Labor government subsidised the corporate giant BHP.
Industrial action
Among militants, Labor's performance generated growing disillusionment with parliamentary methods and a renewal of faith in industrial action.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), better known as the Wobblies, expressed this new tendency within the labour movement. The Wobblies originated in the US but spread rapidly to Canada and NZ, appearing as an organised tendency in Australia in 1907. With its program of direct action, the IWW was openly dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist system.
The Wobblies' implantation in Australia was described by labour writer and historian V. Gordon Childe in his book How Labor Governs as "the most momentous event in the political industrial history of Australian labour, since the historic decision in favour of political action in 1890. Nobody has exercised a more profound influence on the whole outlook of labour in Australia."
The IWW began as an association of militant workers organised in clubs in several industrial cities. They attracted to their banner unskilled and itinerant workers who roved the bush and worked as shearers, cane-cutters, fruit-pickers, miners and railway construction workers. In the course of their militancy, they were placed in the leadership of the labour movement.
The IWW was founded on a program of class struggle. The Wobblies saw themselves as opponents of the rule of the landowners and bosses. They saw through the fraud of liberal morality, which to them only cloaked the robbery of the workers by their masters. And they saw no fundamental moral reason why they should not respond to attacks by the master class with whatever means were necessary.
Opposing the war
With the outbreak of World War I, millions of workers were conscripted into hostile armies on European battlefields and lost their lives. In Australia, the ALP followed the capitulation of European social democracy and gave all-out support to British imperialism. Australian Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes stood at the head of the pro-imperialist forces.
In this situation the IWW in Australia, virtually alone amongst the forces of organised labour, opened up a revolutionary struggle against the war, a struggle that was to become the central issue of Australian politics for many years and was to leave an indelible imprint on Australian labour history.
From the very outset, the IWW, in its newspaper Direct Action, challenged the war aims of British and Australian capitalism. In one of its many famous antiwar covers, it declared: "War! What for? War is Hell. Send the capitalists to hell and wars are impossible."
In 1915, the editor of Direct Action, Tom Barker, was arrested and charged with sedition. Despite the seriousness of the charge, he was released after a short interval, only to be rearrested. In all, he was jailed three times. During his third imprisonment, prominent leaders were alleged to have threatened to burn down certain buildings in Sydney in order to force his release. An elaborate series of charges was constructed including attempted arson, forgery of 5-pound notes and the murder of a policeman.
In his book Sydney's Burning, historian Ian Turner analyses the case and concludes that the charging of 12 IWW members was a frame-up from start to finish, initiated in response to the antiwar stand of Direct Action and to destroy the IWW's influence within the working class.
Alternative to Fabianism
The Wobblies struck real terror into the hearts of the Australian ruling class. Childe sums up the achievements of the IWW: "They can claim the credit for the defeat of conscription, and its anti-war propaganda prepared the way for the ALP peace proposals of 1917. It was the first body to offer effectively to the Australian workers an ideal of emancipation, an alternative to the somewhat threadbare Fabianism of the Labor Party."
The Wobblies were revolutionaries. They had no faith in the capacity of the capitalist system to satisfy the needs of the workers. They were also internationalist to the core and succeeded, through their propaganda and actions, in winning large numbers of Australian workers to an understanding of the link between the class struggle and imperialist war.
Probably most importantly, the IWW carried out an uncompromising struggle against the rapidly growing labour bureaucracy in Australia. Recognising the trade union bureaucrats as opportunists, they called on workers to make a complete break with the politics of the capitalist system, including with labour bureaucracy and its party formation, the ALP.
But the Wobblies were also anarcho-syndicalists. For all their revolutionism and high level of organisation, their weakness was that they rejected "politics", which they equated with the opportunism and careerism of bourgeois politicians. They recognised action only at the point of production in the factory and took no steps to build a genuine working-class party.
Declared illegal in 1916 and under constant attack from the ALP in government, the backbone of the IWW was eventually broken, and it did not survive the war as a significant force.
Despite their short life, the legacy of the Wobblies in the Australian left is a powerful one. In posing the possibility and need for a revolutionary alternative to social democracy, the IWW inspired and educated a whole generation of working class activists and laid the groundwork for a strong tradition of socialist thought and organisation in Australia.